Within a few weeks, her body had begun to change. It had been like some sort of dark miracle, the way the pregnancy grew within her. Every day, she had to go to the facility and be examined by Dr. Turner with his fast eyes and his long hands. She came to feel sick on getting in the stirrups for him, and to loathe his gloved touch.

Once, she’d gone down instead of up and the elevator had opened on a white corridor, clean and modern, totally unlike the building above. Something had been humming—a deep hum—and she had realized that it was another elevator, this one in the far wall, with a sealed steel door, an elevator that must go deep indeed, down into the faults and below them, even.

Then an MP in a uniform so starched that she could smell it had appeared out of nowhere and gently pushed her back into the elevator.

“What is this place?” she’d asked. He’d put his finger to his lips and closed the door. She’d gone up and done her appointment. She hadn’t asked them anything because she knew they wouldn’t tell her. But the next day when she came, she had seen that the B button had been replaced with a key.

She had dreamed that the baby was talking to her, a fat little boy talking and talking, his toothless mouth at once that of an infant and an angel. She had dreamed that the baby had opened the book of life and had told her, “You must die for me.”

Now she knew that it was true and she wanted to cry but she was too weak. She was thinking of that book, and the great day it depicted, when golden light had flooded her life and she had found a lane to the land of the dead.

She hated the baby. The baby was only little, it was nothing, nothing at all, and she was a young woman who had never tasted love, and she must taste love before she left this life, she must!

Sarge tried to take her hand, but she made a fist and he drew back. She wanted to spit at him, to scorn him for his tears.

The disintegration of her body was not painful. Rather, it took the form of a growing silence, and a sort of light, aimless floating. She was a leaf, she was a balloon, a feather. She knew that she could no longer feel her legs. She knew that the odd music she was hearing—discordant, empty of melody—was the sound of Dr. Turner and Sarge shouting at each other.

She saw but did not feel the sheet being thrown aside, saw the baby being lifted away from her, and the sergeant cut the umbilical cord with a pair of scissors in his shaking hands, then lifted the baby high.